Greatest Band: Nirvana
Greatest Album: Master of Puppets, Metallica
Greatest Song: Free Bird, Skynyrd
Greatest Guitarist: Depends on the criteria. I’m going to agree with picking Stevie Ray Vaughan.
-brianjedi
Greatest Band Ever: Genesis (seventies line-up)
Greatest Album Ever: Selling England by the pound/Genesis
Greatest Song Ever: Mad man moon/Genesis
Greatest Guitarist Ever: Carlos Santana
Arrrggh. One slip of a finger and an entire post…vaporized. Here it goes again.
Greatest Band Ever: The King. Even though he became a fat, bloated, constipated lounge singer, hated the Beatles, and was an unintentionally comedic actor, he was a gifted performer and enormously talented. His influence on popular culture, let alone music, is rivaled only by the Beatles. Close seconds: The Clash, Nirvana, The Beatles, and Bruce Springsteen.
Greatest Album Ever: Let it Bleed by the Rolling Stones. I am not even a huge Stones fan, but this album is, from beginning to end, unbelievable. Runners-up: American Beauty by the Grateful Dead, American Recordings by Johnny Cash, Revolver by the Beatles, Pink Floyd’s The Wall, and London Calling by the Clash.
Greatest Song Ever: Whipping Post by the Allmann Brothers (but only because I heard it this morning on my way to work. I’ll have a new favorite on the way home).
Greatest Guitarist Ever: The two-headed **SRV and Hendrix **monster. How do you pick one over the other?
Band: The Beatles. Transformed music in 1964. Transformed music in 1965. Transformed music in 1966. Transformed music in 1967. All current pop music derives from the Beatles. Not even room for argument.
Album: This is the hard one for me. If I had to listen to one album over and over… it would be a mix tape. But in terms of influence and importance, Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited.
Song: You’re all mostly too young to remember the critical argument about the Apollonian and Dionysian strains in pop music, and consider yourself lucky, for your brains would melt if forced through a session of that malarky. But the one underlying point that meant something was that rock was a cultural meltdown of every sort of music that came before it, emphasis on R&B, country, Tin Pan Alley, and folk. Therefore, the greatest songs are the ones that blend in different musical types to create an effect greater than the sun of the parts. My nominees are “Layla,” Derek and the Dominos, “All Along the Watchtower,” the Hendrix version, and “Jessica” from the Allman Brothers. Note that each features one or more of the greatest guitarists ever, and I doubt that that is any coincidence. (Trivia: Dave Mason played acoustic guitar on “Watchtower”.) I waiver among these, but I think I come down on “All Along the Watchtower” because it showed what rock could do with a folk tune and because when you stand between the speakers full up as that guitar chord slides from speaker to speaker it is a religious experience.
Guitarist: Yep. Hendrix.
Fibonacci you know the Bonzo Dog band? I thought I was the only one who liked them - I got into them through my Dad.
I loved songs like Urban Spaceman and Monster Mash, and all the 1920s pastiches!
In answer to the OP:
Greatest Band Ever: The Beatles8
Greatest Album Ever: Wish You Were Here
Greatest Song Ever: Total Eclipse of the Heart
Greatest Guitarist Ever: Gary Moore
The Beatles8 are a relatively unknown nu-metal group from Finland, by the way…
Damn keyboard! :smack:
They mentioned the Velvets and not the Doors? Wouldn’t have happened in the '80’s, dag nabbit!
First let me just say that Seargent Pepper’s is one of the worst albums ever. I love the Beatles, I have a lot of favorite Beatles songs, and I’ll even confess that most of the songs on Seargent Pepper’s get my toes tapping, but it is packed with so much trite, goofy, crap that my most recent session with it left me feeling nothing but resentment. And every Paul McCartney song on that album pointed the way to everything that I now hate about Paul McCartney. I don’t care how many people have been fooled into thinking that this is one of the greatest albums of all time: you’ve all been had.
Also, as great as the Beatles were, I must say that most bands that cite them as a major influence have a tendency to suck. Do not misunderstand me: I do agree that the Beatles have had a massive influence, and that many great bands probably have them to thank as a minor influence, but bands that try to follow in their footsteps make me ill.
And please insert here the usual rant about Nirvana and how they were good but not great, Kurt Cobain was talented but not a genius, Nirvana is only considered so great because their biggest fans never bothered to scratch the surface and check out the better bands that influenced Nirvana, etc etc etc ad nauseum.
Last thing: I think there are a lot of ways to define greatness. You can define it by sales if you like, and/or by how many people tend to agree on the greatness of the band in question. The Beatles fit pretty nicely in there, because they sold a lot of records and it is quite rare that you find someone who won’t even allow that the Beatles were really good, if not fantastic. However, there are plenty of great bands today who owe very little stylistically to the Beatles (or even to Jimmy Hendrix, for that matter), and whose attitude toward the Beatles doesn’t rise far above “like.” “Greatest Band” is a very personal thing, and need not have its basis in what everyone else seems to think.
Thank you. Now:
Greatest Band: What Keith Richards said. But my personal favorite at the moment would have to be Shellac.
Greatest Album: The Cardigans: Life. Not a bad song on it, and the arrangements are perfect.
Greatest Song: ??
Best Guitarist: I always liked Joey Santiago of the Pixies. There is no one quite like him.
Oh yeah, and I almost forgot…
I totally second the nominations for Elvis. Whatever kind of rock ‘n’ roll it is, if you’re on stage dancing and singing to a crowd and you’ve got any kind of beat behind you, you owe it all to the King. He was the first to make it cool.
Posted by JoeyBlades: "Before Alice, this was how people used to describe a good concert: “Well, the band came on. They stood around playing their instruments for a while. A couple of them sang a bit, then Pete smashed his guitar. Man, it was a great show!”
Sigh Another dude that never saw Elvis perform live…or Chuck Berry, or… just fergit it.
Stevie Ray Vaughn on the guitar, Beatles for the band, and the rest is way subjective.